Six Months of Baby: Still New Every Day

sabrina&DashOur infant son, Dashiell, will be six months old in three days.

As mind boggling as that is, our current perspective on the whole thing makes me very glad I’ve been blogging all of this! It seems like forever ago that he was born. Our lives have become so integrated that it just seems like this is the way it’s always been. We don’t even think about things without taking him into account any more.

But it’s only been six months, and that means that things are still changing daily. A few weeks ago, we got our first sustained fit of laughing out of our son, and now he does it all the time, even when a waitress at the restaurant takes more than a passing interest in him! He weighs sixteen pounds and is 30 inches tall, and that’s appreciably different from last week.

The growth spurts keep coming. Yesterday, Dash woke at seven am, yelling to be fed. He had six ounces of formula, then went back to sleep. At eleven, he was ravenous again. I fed him a quarter-container of applesauce, and another six ounces of formula. We walked the dogs, and made Daddy lunch, and he was acting funny again. When he finally started yelling, I realized he was still hungry! He ate another six ounces of formula over the next hour. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations (which I can bore you with if you like), and realized that my sixteen pound son’s consuming eighteen ounces of food is roughly equivalent to me consuming eighteen pints (two-plus gallons) in six hours. That has got to be at the outer limits of what it is even possible for a human body to do!

In other news, we’ve discovered a new ability, sleep-tantrums. These look just like the waking kind, taking about thirty minutes of jiggling and comforting, but they occur entirely with eyes closed and body limp, and end abruptly with snoring! So that’s different…

But for all my funny whining, every day Dashiell becomes more of a person. His personality is equal parts charming, mischievous, and stubborn, and his temper becomes sweeter every day. From what everyone’s telling us, it’s obvious we won the lottery with this child!